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For the last few years, the execution of the Belt and Road Initiative (hereinafter referred to as the BRI) and China’s outward foreign direct investment (hereinafter referred to as OFDI) in Europe have seen a significant upward trend. For our current paper, we collected empirical data pertaining to China’s OFDI and foreign trade (gathered from 21 European countries in the trade gravity market for the period 2003 to 2016) that yielded the following results: (a) China’s OFDI to Europe has significantly promoted international trade between China and European countries. On the other hand, OFDI has equally promoted China’s exports to European counties, while it has not encouraged China’s imports from European counties. (b) The Belt and Road Initiative has had a positive impact on China’s exports to European counties and has had a negative impact on China’s imports from European counties. (c) There have been both complementary trade impacts and substitution trade impacts when China has directly invested in European countries, but the complementary impact was much stronger than its substitution impact in the chosen sample period.

Hong Kong and Macau were reunited with China in the late 1990s as two special administrative regions (SARs). Over the last half century, they were China's good examples of economic development, windows of openness and investors. Owing to historical reasons, China lagged far behind Hong Kong and Macau in terms of per capita incomes. However, rapid economic growth in China over the last three decades must have brought about a significant convergence of the three economies. China's economic success has benefited from the integration of its two SARs and the coastal provinces, especially Guangdong, in terms of technological spillover, massive investment and trade. The economic trickledown, direct investment and trade must have been important drivers of economic integration and income convergence. This paper aims to analyse the trend and studies the determinants of income convergence between China and its two SARs. Both parametric and non-parametric techniques are employed to quantify the pace of convergence on per capita incomes in Hong Kong, Macau and the Chinese provinces over a period of more than 40 years. We find no evidence of convergence in the pre-reform period, but strong evidence of both absolute and conditional &bgr;-convergence in the post-reform period. Over the reform period, the pace of convergence is less than 1 per cent per annum without controlling for trade and more than 2 per cent conditional on trade. Copyright 2007 The Authors.

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